I tell Amir that a significant reason for my coming here is to absorb the milieu of Sadeq Hedayat and Forough Farrokhzad. Our conversation quickly delves into Hedayat’s biography and, inevitably, leads to his death in Paris. Amir falls silent. He puts down his cutlery, glances to his side, and says: ‘Sometimes people kill themselves because they reach the outermost lengths of the knowledge for which they were here.’

I wake up to police tapping on the window of the car. The driver’s seat next to me is empty. The police banter at me in Farsi. I look through the windshield. We’re next to a park. I roll down the window and ask if they speak English. They say no and frown. Amir darts out of the public toilet in the park. ‘Don’t worry brother, just do what they say.’ They search the car. They take the lids off and sniff our water bottles, checking for alcohol. One of the officers puts Amir in the police car; the other one sits in the driver’s seat of our car. He thrashes it along the roads. He speeds up inside the police compound, brakes fast, and nudges the front fender into the side of the station. They place us in separate rooms. Six officers in military fatigues enter and close the door behind them. For the next ninety minutes they ask the same questions in broken English, twisting the phrasing and the order of the questions, waiting for me to slip up and change my story. ‘What is your job? Why are you here? What is your religion? Muslim? Christian? Marxist? How did you meet this man? He is a very bad man. He is trying to kidnap you. How much are you paying him? He’s addicted to crystal meth. Are you also taking crystal meth?’

‘‘‘He is trying to kidnap you. How much are you paying him? He’s addicted to crystal meth. Are you also taking crystal meth?’’’

Eventually, they seem satisfied with my blank responses. They calm down and ask if I’m married and if I like Iran. I am escorted to the hallway and wait there. A supervisor comes up to me. He loads up a picture of Ayatollah Rohani on his smartphone. ‘Do you know this man?’ he asks. ‘Well, not personally,’ I respond. Another officer translates and laughs. Amir comes out. The problem is that there are no registration papers in the car, a simple matter that will take them hours to resolve. We are not allowed to leave the compound in the meantime.

‘What did you say that you do for work?’ Amir asks.

‘Teacher.’

‘Good. Don’t tell anyone you’re a writer, brother.’

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

The day grinds along. Hours pass. They impound the car. We can leave but we are on the outskirts where the Metro lines do not reach. As we linger out the front, an officer in a black leather uniform arrives on a motorcycle. He sees me and brightens. He yells at the police that arrested us, tells them that they are giving a foreigner a bad impression of Iran. Clearly an authority, he charges through the station arguing with the officers and we are quickly given the car back. As we drive out, the man looks at me and says, ‘I love you!’

Amir takes me to a place to stay, a six-storey building packed with dormitories. The rooms are filled with up to 200 rural villagers from all over the country who have moved to the capital for work. In the basement the residents offer me tea, biscuits, nuts, mandarins, and a pair of sandals.

The hallway floor of the museum is spattered with fake blood. Stretching from the long corridors are a series of chambers where dissidents were tortured for inciting revolutionary acts against the Shah’s regime. Plaques explain various torture techniques, all of which are played out by histrionic wax dolls. Dozens of dolls in various rooms re-enact the techniques: splinters thrust under fingernails, jammed down to the quick and then slowly torched; penis electrocutions that would produce erratic leaks of urine and blood for days; small cages suspended above flaming stovetops; wire knotted shackles to suspend men on a wire fence; small rooms where hordes of prisoners were deprived of food or sanitation for weeks; whippings, beatings, strangulation. At the entrance to the chambers a doll of the Shah sits in a prop Cadillac sipping champagne.

As I traverse this carnival of barbarism, I recall Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), in which he muses on the at-times vapid nature of performativity:

one becomes aware of the unreal emptiness of the theatres, they’re walled up like dangerous holes, only moths from the padded edging of the loggia whirl down through the unstable hollow space ... All public watchdogs search dutifully far and wide for that irreplaceable third person who himself was the plot.

The propaganda feels almost pornographic. The grotesque nature of this theatre of atrocity is more concerned with heralding the revolution than giving any justice to the human life that was obliterated inside these walls. Such a garish and monstrous approach does not transform a historical trauma into recognition or reconciliation. Instead, it reinforces the unfair tropes that the West utilises to make up its paternalistic representation of Iran.

In The Blind Owl (1937), Hedayat incorporated various cut-up segments of Rilke’s only novel. This was a literary gesture to transcend what he felt was a sickness of history. Through such methods of poetic estrangement, participants in, and spectators of, enmity can transcend their afflictions.

I struggle with these intractable knots in my mind, until I have to leave to let a large group of schoolchildren through.

Many days have passed. I trek out to find the grave of Farrokhzad, the poet and film-maker who died in a car crash in Tehran at the age of thirty-two. I descend into the Metro. The walls are emblazoned with neon advertisements for non-alcoholic beer. Amir calls me. He tells me that it is the last day of Arba’een – a forty-day period of lamenting the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. The streets are replete with trestle tables where people are handing out free tea and food. Plasma screens in shops show the throng of up to seventeen million Shia Muslims who are making the pilgrimage to Karbala in Iraq. I linger outside a ceremonial hall and peer through a crack in a doorway as the mourners file in and out. I note the washing of the body, the rinsing of the mouth. Bodies curve into ovals of prayer. Wide pools of water seem to murmur the engravings on the graves they are rushing over. In this multitude, it feels as though the people are slowly disappearing into each other. I watch as this ancient death merges with the living.

I return to the dormitory. A young, pale-skinned, androgynous man smokes thin cigarettes in the corner of the basement. He wetshis thick lips and picks at a blackened toenail onto the painted red concrete floor. He introduces himself as Foad. He tells me that he is from the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan and that around half of the men who live in the building are as well. Overhearing our conversation, the Iranians and the Kurds start to slander one another, calling one another stupid. ‘It is a cold reality,’ Foad says. He smirks and adds: ‘if we can laugh together, we can live together.’ His lips tremble: ‘Tehran is a whore-house.’ He notes my confusion and continues: ‘You see, brother, my mouth is not a hole that can be filled with mud.’ He pauses. ‘Now drink your tea. Proverbs go well with tea.’ We laugh as the other men take turns impersonating one another jovially. Bouncing about the corners of the ceiling, a little bird is trapped in the basement, exhausted. Foad gets up, opens the door for the bird and wishes me goodnight.

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

A lunatic has held up a café in Sydney, and two hostages have been killed. The men in the dormitory keep apologising to me. I reassure them that it has nothing to do with them. I make my way to Khane Honarmandan, a notorious park where artists and poets gather at cafés, galleries, theatres, trees, fountains. I sit on a bench. In the garden a young woman is playing a harmonica for her boyfriend. He smiles and embraces her; slips his fingers beneath her headscarf and runs his finger down her outer ear. A little girl plays in some loose soil. In Latin letters she etches what I assume is her name – Aban. She smiles at me, wipes the dirt, and proceeds to crawl into a ball, as though trying to mould her body into a glass jar. Night falls. People begin to leave the park. A desolate wind blows across the grass. My nerves feel pinched. A sense of spiritual otherworldliness sublimates me, but I feel paralysed by it at the same time. Again, my thoughts drift to Hedayat: ‘I moved in the regions where life and death fuse together and perverse images come into being and ancient, extinct desires, vague, strangled desires, again come to life and cry out for vengeance.’

I read about the park. One of the first results I find details the public execution that took place there a year ago. Two petty thieves were hanged from construction cranes at dawn. Defilement and freedom gnaw on their shared threshold.

What is it I am seeing that is being seized by the horns? What is it that is hatching?

I wake from a dream in which I was being beaten with long lengths of chains. I did not feel any pain because the chains were wriggling slugs linked together by swallowing themselves in knots. Foad pulls me out of bed and makes me tea. I tell him about my dream.

‘That’s lovely, my brother, lovely,’ he says. ‘Your imagination is waking up.’

I drink tea and scrape the sleep out of my eyes.

‘You know that Hedayat wrote The Blind Owl while living in Bombay for a year, no?’

‘No.’

Foad leaves for work. I drink tea in the basement. Maybe Hedayat could only conceive of the narratives of his homeland from a distance; from a disrupted stream of memories. Perhaps this is only what I am trying to absorb. Are these sensations all from my cultural and political ignorance? Perhaps. Regardless, akin to its poetic nature, both the inner and outer life of this city is a process of discovery. Compounded by an iron-fisted government politic, the senses are at once twisted and throbbing. One can only attempt to gesture towards an understanding of the social phenomenon of Tehran. As it trammels through its own void, Tehran seems to trespass on time.

I step out. Rain pelts the smog into the asphalt. I smell petrol in the rain. I let the city seep in once more. The last gold of the sun drizzles in a mist.

I tell the men in the dormitory that I am leaving for Isfahan. We eat mandarins and drink tea in the basement. Amir comes around. I give him my journal and ask him to write something inside. He asks for my computer and walks off with them both. I check my browser history and see that he has been searching for English translations of Ahmad Shamlou.

In the bus I open my journal and find that Amir has transcribed the last stanza from Ahmad Shamlou’s eulogy to Farrokhzad:

Your name is like dawn passing over the brow of the sky
– May your name be blessed! –
And we are still
Rehearsing
The night and the day
And the present moment.

I close my journal, look through the window, and wait until the city disappears from view.

Scott McCulloch’s ‘Letter from Ukraine’ appeared in our October 2014 issue. He is currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia. His next Letter will be from Athens. Some names have been changed to protect his associates’ identity.